Why Linus Torvalds would rather code than make money

The Linux kernel is what everything else runs on top of, so it's the key to everything that a Linux device can do.
It's in your Android phone. It's in the computers that run the servers at Google, Amazon and all the other web services that we take for granted.

It powers the database that US immigration uses to decide if you are who you say you are, it's deep under the Alps searching for new particles at CERN, and it's even on unmanned drones searching for drugs traffickers in the Caribbean.

Linux is everywhere.

We at Linux Format were lucky enough to speak to Linus Torvalds, the man who wrote the original Linux kernel and still works as its maintainer.

Latest News

Games for GNU/Linux

Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.
Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

Containers News

Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.
The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it's tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

AMDGPU News

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it's now available for download from AMD.
This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.